Over the last two decades, there has been a surge of opioid-related overdose deaths resulting in a myriad of state policy responses. Researchers have evaluated the effectiveness of such policies using a wide-range of statistical models, each of which requires multiple design choices that can...

Over the last two decades, there has been a surge of opioid-related overdose deaths resulting in a myriad of state policy responses. Researchers have evaluated the effectiveness of such policies using a wide-range of statistical models, each of which requires multiple design choices that can...

We perform a comparative analysis of machine learning methods for the canonical problem of empirical asset pricing: measuring asset risk premia. We demonstrate large economic gains to investors using machine learning forecasts, in some cases doubling the performance of leading regression-based...

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely-matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the International Comparisons Program...

We summarize existing empirical findings regarding the adoption of robotics and AI and its effects on aggregated labor and productivity, and argue for more systematic collection of the use of these technologies at the firm level. Existing empirical work primarily uses statistics aggregated by...

In many health domains, we are concerned that observed links - for example, between “healthy” behaviors and good outcomes - are driven by selection into behavior. This paper considers the additional factor that these selection patterns may vary over time. When a particular health behavior...

This chapter will cover recent research in historical economics that uses ethnographic data and data from surveys and lab experiments. The study of historical economics, particularly outside of non-Western countries, has been constrained by availability of historical data. However, recent work...

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of patent citation data in social science research. Facilitated by digitization of the patent data and increasing computing power, a community of practice has grown up that has developed methods for using these data to: measure...

In many cases, aggregate data is used to make inferences about individual level behavior. If there are social interactions in which one person's actions influence his neighbor's incentives or information, then these inferences are inappropriate. The presence of positive social interactions, or...

Estimates of volunteering in the United States vary greatly from survey to survey and do not show the decline over time common to other measures of social capital. We argue that these anomalies are caused by the social processes that determine survey participation, in particular the propensity...